


Inertia

by Frangipanidownunder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 23:15:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15568509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frangipanidownunder/pseuds/Frangipanidownunder
Summary: hey! you write angst so beautifully and i was just wondering if you’d write something during s11 where mulder is hesitant to officially get involved with scully again (her wanting to move home for example) but of course with a happy ending!





	Inertia

The first time she dropped by was a nostalgic surprise. She’d long since stopped doctoring him - working again had let light through the cracks in his wounded psyche. Scully had been the brightest source, pushing him out of that dark place rung by rung just by walking by his side again.

He was listening to Prince, full volume, perusing grainy photos from cases so cold he’d had to defrost them. His uneaten microwave meal was congealing in its plastic dish, his feet were crossed on the desk, grey track pants hoiked up to reveal grungy Bigfoot socks. She tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped so hard the packet of seeds fell and scattered across the floorboards. He thought of Ronnie Strickland and hummed the tune to Shaft as he dropped to his knees.

“Jesus, Scully. You could have called.”

“I did. I also texted, left seven voicemails, Facebook messaged you, jumped onto that Reddit thread about cryptids and tried to spot you there. I even rang the neighbour. He just told me…”

“That I needed to get a real job instead of dressing up like Sasquatch and scaring the bejesus out of folk?”

She nodded and perched on the edge of the desk. “Where were you? I was so worried I drove over.”

“Leaving a quinoa and smoked trout salad and a nice crisp Chianti behind?”

Her lips folded together and she let out that noise somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. She picked up the plastic bowl between her fingers and sniffed tentatively. “More like one of these and a diet Coke. I just can’t be bothered to cook any more, Mulder.” She walked to the kitchen and disposed of the dish. “Honestly, that apartment may be ‘elite Washington living’ but sometimes it feels like Orwellian chrome hell. Dana, you didn’t put the trash out today. Dana, your appointment with the Well Woman Clinic is due in 23 hours. Dana, your gas bill is due in 3 weeks.”

“Dana, your partner is picking up sunflower seeds one by one and you’re just standing there watching.”

She didn’t end up helping him, but they did end up cooking something more appetising than microwaved mac and cheese, then watching Armaggedon with him and falling asleep against his shoulder. It wasn’t until Langly’s flickering face woke them that he realised how odd it felt, to find her there. Something he couldn’t process because there were strange men shooting at them in his house.

It was when she called it in, said the address, Fox Mulder’s residence, that really cemented their separation. It used to be their home. Now it was his residence.

They did go to Ikea. She picked out lots of anaemic furniture in square –set styles that would suit her chrome hell.

“I think,” he said, peering at the photo of the white legged barstool on the flat-pack, “that this would look better in your kitchen, Scully.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose. “Along with the silver fruit dish and the crystal weigh scales.”

“I don’t have crystal weigh scales, Mulder. And what’s wrong with this stool? You could do with lifting the mood in that place. It’s always so dark.”

He bristled as he followed her along the shelves. Swedish furniture stacked up, what did they call it? ScandiChic? Or was that a book genre? There was nothing here that would suit his place. His residence.

She stopped and turned round. He loved the way her hair fell now, it suited her long. He remembered picking long red strands from the pillows back when life in hiding lent a weight to their relationship, made it all the more important to hold tight to his chest. Only trouble was, he’d held it so tight he’d crushed the life out of her and she’d left so that she could breathe again, mend the broken bones around her heart.

“See anything you like?” she asked.

He thought about opening up the flat-packs and building something from scratch. What if he left out a dowel or found a screw after spending all that time constructing it? What if it didn’t fit the rest of the décor?

“I’m not feeling it, Scully.”

Her sigh was sharp. He looked back to the shelves and ran his hand along the edges of the cardboard, looking again at the photos.

“There’s always the junk store in the main street. There might be something there that takes your fancy. Just don’t expect me to like it.”

The bones of his hips dug into his fingers as he stood there, massaging away the scorn in her voice. “You mean the antique place?”

“Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean it’s antique, Mulder. Let’s get some meatballs. I’m hungry.”

There was a podcast he liked to listen to on the porch. Something about the way the cool shadows draped over the deck in the evening added to the ambience of the presenter recounting ghostly encounters in London’s ancient streets. Scully had arrived unannounced, brought a bottle of shiraz and a bag of vegetables that she somehow turned into a reasonable stir-fry. Now, she seemed settled in. Her noble profile had always fascinated him, the slope of her nose, the length of her chin, the lines of her cheekbones, sharper these days. Scully was a beauty, incongruous in the plastic chair against the peeling wall of the deck. She was the oil colour against the watery horizon. Sitting there reading the latest paediatric medical techniques in a glossy journal while he was listening to grisly tales of mystery, just about summed up their differences. He hadn’t let go of his past, he hadn’t changed. His routine remained the same. He was as habitual as the ghosts in his mind, lurking in alleyways, haunting old buildings. Perhaps that’s what people thought about him. Spooky Mulder, still materialising in the corridors of the Hoover Building, spouting his arcane nonsense.

He pulled out an ear-bud. “Do you think I’m spooky?”

“We’ve had this conversation before, Mulder.” Her magazine sat across her lap and she didn’t look at him.

“Why are you here, Scully? What did you come here for?”

A short snort from her nose and she turned to him. “I cooked dinner.”

“You could have done that at your place.”

“I told you what I think about my place, Mulder. It’s sterile and cold.”

“I’ve seen your fireplace, Scully.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “And you know it. Sometimes,” she paused, grinned. “I just miss you.”

That smile, rare still, softened the edges of his discomfort. “We work together every day.”

“That’s not what I meant, either. And you know it.” She grinned again, even wider, showing her teeth briefly before covering them and dipping her head back to her lap.

In one ear, the narrator recounted a story about the spirit of a young woman who chose to jump into the murky waters of the Thames rather than spend her life with a husband who wasn’t her lover. Her heart had cursed this girl to wander the cobbled paths of the London mile for infinity. Had she watched her lover marry someone else, watched him play with the children that weren’t theirs, watch him grow old and die? Was she still there now, floating above the mortal inhabitants of that city hoping they chose a more sensible course of action or did she encourage them to choose their heart’s path?

“Why did you move in to that place?”

She shrugged. “I was looking for something.”

“Did you find it?”

She folded the magazine shut and slipped it onto the floor under the chair. She stood up and leant back against the verandah post. There was a silver swirl of stars behind her, ghostly in the night sky, celestial bodies forever falling.

“I don’t think so.”

He stood up too, bracing his hands on the rail, feeling the splinters of paint dig into his skin. “Are you still looking?”

She turned to look out with him, leaning her hip against him, triggering a chain reaction of impulses, a similar incline in his posture, a hand on the small of her back, a deep inhalation, chancing a look down at her. She rested her head in the space between his arm and his chest.

“To find it, I need to look behind me, Mulder. And that scares me.”

It scared him too. There was so much darkness behind them both. He sometimes wondered if she chose that clean chrome hell just for its bright lines that could dazzle and guide her. Her life had been on a better trajectory since that Father Joe case, since she left. Their partnership, the original version, had been thrust upon her. She’d followed where he’d taken them. So much of that life had been thrown at her. She’d taken the hits and he’d tried to soften the blows. This time round, she walked back into that basement office with her eyes wide open. Side by side, they walked; and he loved this version of her, even if he hankered after the old Scully sometimes. The one who snuffled in her sleep, the one who made shitty pasta bakes, the one whose feet were always cold, the one who left the lights on downstairs.

“Say you found it, what then, Scully?”

“It’s not just up to me.”

The apartment was gutted. He helped her pack clothes and essentials. She stood in the living room – a misnomer, if ever there was one, and looked at the fat vase that had survived.

“I bought that at a gallery I visited in New York.”

“When was this?” He’d never heard her talk about a trip to the Big Apple. But then, he hadn’t listened very well for far too long.

“A few years back, after…before we joined the FBI again. It was an impulse buy.” She laughed but cut it off abruptly. “I’m only usually impulsive when I’m unhappy.”

The vase was ridged terracotta at its round base, deepening to a shiny black glaze at its fluted neck. It was a statement. “Do you want me to pack it?”

She shook her head, reaching forward to touch his hand. “There isn’t enough room in the hotel for everything.” She squeezed the side of his hand then slipped hers into his palm. “I’ll just have to decide what to take and what to leave behind.”

She invited him to the diner near the hotel one Sunday on the promise of crab sliders in squid ink brioche buns. He ordered the cheeseburger and she let rip with a peal of bell laughter that he enjoyed as he waited for her to steal his fries.

“How’s the apartment hunting?”

She looked out the window at a young couple strolling arm in arm. “Were we ever like that? Carefree, arm in arm, sharing dreams. Just two people in billions living their lives, just two small objects moving around the earth.”

His coffee was suddenly too cold. “What we had was founded on more than carefree dreaming, Scully. Do you think we were small, insignificant?”

She shook her head. “No, I think what we had could not be contained.”

“So does that mean we still have it? This thing that cannot be packaged neatly away?”

“Do you?” The sound of the coffee machine whirring filled the space. She pulled the meat out of the bun and separated the two halves. “Sometimes I feel like we’ve moved so far forward that we can never go back. Other times I imagine we’ve gone full circle and the only way forward is to start over.” She pulled a side of bun back with her fork then brought it to a stop, mid-plate. “Aristotle thought that in the absence of any force applied to it, that an object would come to rest.” She forked the other half and pushed it around the other half. “He believed the continued motion of projectiles separated from their projector, by the action of the surrounding medium, continued to move the object in some way, but that such motion in a void was impossible.”

The waiter poured more coffee and he watched liquid spin as he stirred, a coppery froth forming on the whirlpool. “But he hadn’t anticipated resistance, friction or gravity.”

She stopped turning the bun and put the fork down. “It wasn’t until the 14th century that Jean Buridan proposed that a moving object would be arrested by the resistance of the air and the weight of the body and that would oppose its motion-generating property.”

“Impetus.”

“Yes,” she said. “Objects react to a propellant or a force. And the principle of inertia is that an object will resist a change in motion.”

“Are you trying to tell me something here, Scully? Am I the propellant or the object in motion?”

“In modern terms, physicists argue that on very large scales the traditional view of inertia does not apply and is not reliable.”

“So the fact that we had something big, something grand on the love scale, lends weight to the theory that our trajectory has been or will continue to be unpredictable?”

He closed his eyes and looked back. He remembered long drives on winding roads, where trees cowed under rain and mountains held secrets. Where Scully dozed against the window, threw shade on his theories, read autopsy reports like he read the sports pages. Those long drives into the unknown, compelled on a case by a random set of circumstances that took place outside their orbit, where the forces of friction kept the tyres to the road and enabled them to navigate frozen bends, but where equally, the friction of the elements of the engine constantly wore against each other. Could he look forward? What would he see?

“Things that are still, remain still, Mulder. But things that move keep moving at a steady rate…”

“Unless a force is applied to them to push or pull them so that the thing speeds up or changes direction.”

“And when a force acts on a thing, there’s an equal but opposite force.”

He nodded. “You’re applying your force on me to get a reaction.”

“We can remain still, Mulder.” She slid her hand across to his and smiled. “Or we can see where the laws of physics take us.”


End file.
